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President Donald Trump’s latest coronavirus press conference on Saturday afternoon was littered with both false claims about the pandemic crisis and about various unrelated matters Trump decided to talk about, from North Korea and Iran to Chinese tariffs.
Trump continued to be dishonest on the critical subject of coronavirus testing, wrongly claiming he “inherited” faulty tests — they were developed this year, during his presidency — and painting an overly rosy picture of the US testing situation.
He also repeated several of the false claims he likes to make at his campaign rallies.
Here’s a preliminary rundown of the claims and the facts. We will update this throughout the night.
The “cupboard” of medical supplies
At Saturday’s briefing, President Trump repeated his claim that he inherited a “bare cupboard” of medical supplies to fight coronavirus from the Obama administration.
“We started off with a broken system. We inherited a broken, terrible system. And I always say it, our cupboards were bare. We had very little in our stockpile. Now we’re loaded up.”
Facts First: Trump’s argument has some truth to it, but it’s also somewhat misleading. While Trump isn’t wrong to suggest he inherited a depleted stockpile of some medical supplies — the stockpile of masks, for example, was depleted and not replenished by the Obama administration — the cupboards were not completely “bare”; he inherited significant quantities of other supplies. And Trump had three years in office to build depleted stockpiles back up.
The Strategic National Stockpile was not empty before the coronavirus pandemic. For example, the stockpile contains enough smallpox vaccines for every American, among other medical resources. However, critical supplies that could be used to combat coronavirus were drained and not replenished.
Ultimately, Trump ignored the warnings of experts and failed to restock masks and prepare other supplies to fight a potential pandemic.
“Broken Junk”
Facts First: The faulty initial test for the coronavirus was created during Trump’s administration in early 2020 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since this is a new virus that was first identified this year, the bad tests couldn’t possibly be “inherited.”
“He is lying. He is lying 100%. He is lying because he is trying to shift blame to others, even if the attempt is totally nonsensical,” Gregg Gonsalves, an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at the Yale School of Public Health, said of an earlier version of this Trump claim.
The claim “doesn’t make sense because it is false,” Tara Smith, an epidemiology professor at Kent State University, said of an earlier version. “This is a new virus.”
Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, called an earlier version of the claim “absurd” given that “this virus did not exist in the prior administration.”
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